I use Yesmail360i every day to assist and manage my clients' email programs. It helps manage a clients' email program with an easier way to target customers, set up messages and deploy messages in a timely manner.

YesMail was used by several departments in my last organization. It was a CRM system used to review customer contacts with emails, it was a reporting tool to show email engagement, and it was, of course, an email platform and outbound messaging system. It provided a central place for anyone with access to go in order to gauge content engagement as well as see email engagement overall. Plus, we could see which members were responding to what, and how often. It tied in with our external, broader, database directly and seamlessly.

CUSTOMER SERVICE. Any time myself, or my team, needed help with the system or help with figuring out how to build something new, the YesMail staff were more than happy to help, easy to work with, and easy to get a hold of.

The platform is intuitive, visual, and easy to navigate. Plus the inclusion of "tabs" in the interface makes navigation extremely easy. It's possible to access multiple parts of the module without going back and forth between browser windows.

The Market Intelligence tool is extremely useful, and provides unique insights into competitor's mailings so that it's easier to spot marketing trends, or see what others have tried and get a gauge of their successes and failures (as determined by open rates, Delete w/o open rates, etc.) so that my own team was able to either mimic techniques that had shown useful, or avoid trying certain things that were shown through those competitors not to work.

The Market Intelligence tool, while useful, and while it has a Deliverability Intelligence plug-in as well, is still a little rough. It's hard to sort through reports, and the location of different points of information between the "feed" and the list of marketers, is a little cumbersome to sort through.

The metrics available could use some updating and some clarification. There are quite a few caveats to reporting that aren't clearly stated. Ex. the clicks reported on a "click thru" report are TOTAL clicks, while the clicks reported on a Delivery and Response report are FIRST CLICK ONLY, while also the dashboard reports might show unique clicks and "clicks" (total clicks) but those numbers might also not match with the other two reports because dashboard reports are behind by 2 hours whereas the specific reports are pulling straight from the CRM within the system, and the dashboards are summaries generated every couple of hours from the CRM. All of those details took me a while to figure out, and I had to ask a lot of questions. But my account manager was always easy to get a hold of, and if he didn't know the answers to my questions he was quick about tracking down someone who did.

For all outbound messaging, YesMail is perfect. For Social Media management, or for customer service management, where customers or subscribers need a place to "talk back" to your organization, YesMail might not be the best platform.

We utilize Yesmail for blast campaigns, automated drip campaigns, renewal programs, cross promos & some transactional emails. We use it across 5 products and target over 20 languages. The reporting features allow me to create highly segmented lists of customers which increases deliverability, engagement and helps deliver the right message at the right time. I would suggest YesMail for anyone who is adapt with web applications, it is not super user friendly so you do need an analytical mind to get the most out of it.

Yesmail is being used across two business units. It is our primary tool for email marketing to our customers. We have it integrated with our CRM (a project that took a long time to complete). We've been using it for three years in our business unit and it works well. We haven't fully leveraged the deliverability services which is our next step.

Yesmail is a good tool for high volume sending. It seems like a powerful tool that we haven't fully leveraged yet. We could use more help from the account management team to make sure we are getting the most out of it.

Software has some quirks that take a bit of getting used to and can require what I deem as "hacks" to make things work. In particular, I have had issues with localized versions of emails going out as UTF-8 and some related bugs with that.

They do not seem very willing to work with small-medium business models that have forced us to utilize other email deployment platforms. We attempted to negotiate with them and drop our monthly volume from 100k emails down to something closer to 20k, or even go to a pay-per-use model. They were not willing to do any of that and basically said 100k is the minimum and the lowest price they could do was $1200 per month. Obviously, this did not work for us.

Costs seem very high for consulting and whitelisting of new email domain setup.

I would ask them how hands-on they will be with the tool and how important is having a support/account person only a phone call away. YM has been very good about making their people available to you on a personal level when you have issues.

The biggest strength of YesMail is that it's good for churning out large amounts of emails. So if you constantly send out a lot of emails, newsletters, or promotions on a daily or weekly basis then YesMail is a good fit.

The reporting for YesMail is also above average. You're able to look at all the main metrics such as open rates, click rates, bounces, unsubscribes, etc. They also have a click map so you can optimize your emails based on where people are clicking within the email and what content they're clicking on.

YesMail also has a fairly good scrubbing process in place so if you have a lot of dead weight on your lists (email addresses that aren't active don't open, click or bounce out a lot) then YesMail will automatically remove these emails. For example if an email address has bounced 10 times in a row then YesMail will remove that email from its system.

The targeting within YesMail is lackluster at best, you can't do much dynamic targeting when deploying your emails. For instance if you want to set up an email campaign where someone receives an email 24 hours after opening or receiving an email you won't be able to.

YesMail also doesn't integrate well with other systems, so you won't be able to fully connect your data within YesMail with other tools such as Omniture, Google Analytics or other software you might use such as web forms. Without being able to connect all your data and software you're limited on how you can transfer data into YesMail.

Another common theme with YesMail is that it constantly breaks down. They will run an update or try fixing something and it will cause havoc within the system. You will find that your emails get disabled or don't deliver correctly.

YesMail also needs to improve upon how it stores the data attached to your email addresses. If you have other contact information such as address, phone, state, country, etc attached with an email address YesMail won't be able to clean up the data automatically you will have to do this manually. The amount of characters for a given field is very limited. So if someone has a long address or phone number that exceeds the character limit the data won't pass over to YesMail.

YesMail also isn't built to be a fully automated system so you won't be able to track and follow your audience through different email campaigns. There's no overall life-cycle for an email address like you would have with a system such as Eloqua.

I would not recommend YesMail to any of my colleagues. There's far better products out in the marketplace that I have experience with such as Eloqua and Exact Target that are far superior to YesMail. The product I would recommend most would be Eloqua, they have the full marketing automation that you need to be successful in today's marketplace. Eloqua has the dynamic targeting, lead management, customer lifecycle and the marketing measurement you want to have the best chance at increasing your ROI. I would only recommend YesMail to those who want to churn out a high volume of emails and nothing else.